In-depth Written Interview

Insights Beyond the Movie

Phil Hoose, interviewed in his studio in Portland, Maine on August 17, 2001.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You appear to really love interviewing people — having interviewed hundreds of people for It's Our World, Too! and We Were There, Too!

PHIL HOOSE: I love to interview people. It's one of my favorite things to do in the world. When maybe two interviews would do, I'll interview seven people. I want a lot of context. It takes a lot of energy to interview people well. One has to listen so attentively.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Please describe your interview process.

PHIL HOOSE: I find interviewees by delving into the material of whatever it is that I want to write about. I keep interviewing, and every interview is like a rose unfolding. There are more and more people identified to talk to, and after I while, I get to talking with them, too.

I record the interviews on tape, always with the permission of the interviewee. I have a tape recorder that hooks up to my phone upstairs where I write. I then play the tape back, maybe not that minute. I'm pretty spent afterwards because it takes a lot of energy to interview people well. One has to listen so attentively. But I wait a day or two and then I listen to it again. Sometimes I transcribe them, type out what people have said. Often I don't. But I pick sort of the "greatest hits" from the interview and remind myself with notes about the highlights in the interview. Then I weave that material into the stories that I write.

We Were There, Too! took me about six years to write. It was a mountain of research and a mountain of interviewing, and a whole lot of travel. But one of the good things was that there are discrete, separate vignettes in the book, about seventy chapters, basically, and I was able to apply one interview per chapter. I didn't have to worry about putting it back at the beginning of the book or where to place it. That was really a good thing about doing this. I usually had six or seven stories going at once, which could be a little maddening, juggling all that.

TEACHINGBOOKS: It's Our World, Too! is a book about young people who have changed their communities and the world. What inspired you to write it?

PHIL HOOSE: In the early nineties, my daughter Hannah was a kindergartner, and she helped organize an art sale in her school that raised money for a homeless shelter here in town. I was very proud of her. I thought that was just terrific. I was between books. I had just finishedNecessities and was looking around for the next book. It hit me that there must be many, many examples of young people in this country and around the world who have tried to change things or who have figured out ways to make their communities better.

So I began to do some research on this. I wrote a book for Little, Brown called It's Our World, Too! It was really in three parts. That's the way it turned out. The first part was about fifteen pages of young people in U.S. history, young social activists in U.S. history — sort of the precursor to the longer book I later wrote. [We Were There, Too!]

Then I wrote about fifteen stories of young people who were doing all sorts of things to cause change, both sort of radical actions and just trying to sort of change their relationships with people. One boy rebuilt hundreds of bikes and gave them away to homeless shelters and battered women's shelters. Another boy changed the way that StarKist had contractual relationships with tuna companies in order to save dolphins. This boy, Joel Rubin, a boy who's now twenty-six and a good friend of mine, hated fishing for tuna with drift-nets, which were these mile-long purses that were dragged through the oceans, and they caught not only tuna, but they caught mammals — dolphins, porpoises. He just hated that the animals were dragged down and kept underwater and killed. He wanted to get the tuna companies in the United States who made contracts with, mainly, Japanese fishing companies to get rid of these drift-nets. So he found this wicked way to do it. He sent bright postcards to the homes of StarKist executives. He organized his whole school to send these postcards. He hoped that the executives' children would see the postcards and guilt-trip their parents into changing it. And it worked. So I did fifteen or so of these stories.

The last part of It's Our World, Too! is a handbook, a sort of a "Rules for Radicals" for children, in which I took ten tools: how to write a good letter, how to organize an effective petition, how to get the reporter you want at a press conference, when to demonstrate, based on the experiences that young people throughout the country had already done. These weren't my rules; these were theirs, and I put this sort of a ten-tool manual at the end of the book.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Do you consider yourself a social activist?

PHIL HOOSE: I don't know if I would call myself a social activist, but I am involved in lots of organizations. I've worked for The Nature Conservancy for about twenty-five years. We try to save the species of plants and animals on the earth by saving the habitat that remains for them. So I guess that might make me an activist. I'm on the board of the Children's Music Network, an organization that I helped found, because we want to bring good music to parents and children. I am involved in all sorts of things, I suppose. Maybe that does make me a social activist. I don't know.

TEACHINGBOOKS: We Were There, Too! is a social history book that includes many contributions of young people. Where did you get the idea to write such a book?

PHIL HOOSE: I got the idea to write We Were There, Too! from a conversation I had with Sarah Rosen, a twelve-year-old girl whom I had written about in a prior book, It's Our World, Too! She was one of the young social activists. She had been upset because a school reenactment, a play about the Constitutional Convention of 1787, did not include girls. Girls weren't allowed. The principal's rationale and the teacher's rationale was, "Well, there weren't any females involved in the event, so we're not going to have any females involved in the reenactment." So Sarah got mad and thought it over and organized many of her friends and came back and organized a counter-convention at her school, involving girls.

I really like her. I loved talking with her. We were just chewing the fat one day over the telephone. She said, "You know, the whole thing about history is just really disappointing to me. If I look at my history book, there's nobody my own age in the history book." She said, "It's as if you don't even count until you're about twenty, in a history book." I said, "Really?" She said, "Yes." I said, "That can't still be true. I know that was true when I was a history student. We had a

U.S. history book and it weighed 587 pounds and it was a single book, and it was all full of men in powdered wigs and so forth. It wasn't very interesting. But it can't still be that way, with all the years of literature that have happened. It has to be taught better than that." She said, "No. My textbook weighs 587 pounds, and that's the way it still is."

So I went to Lincoln Middle School here in Portland Maine, where I live, and got a history teacher to let me look at the history book that he was using to teach U.S. history to middle schoolers.

It weighed 587 pounds. It was one book, and it was full of guys in powdered wigs and presidents and generals, and so forth. It just didn't look very much different. There were young people in it, but there were just two or three — Sacagawea and Pocahontas. Young people just were not really present.

It occurred to me that what Sarah had said was correct, in the sense that I think the best chance that most people get to bond to history is possibly their first chance, which is when they're seventh-graders and eighth-graders. They have to take U.S. history. If you could get somebody to love history then, perhaps they would continue to love history. Certainly, there are countless examples of people who grew to love history later. I'm not saying it's the only chance you get — yet I think it's probably best to really set the hook and bait the fish when you can. So I decided, having written fifteen pages of history in a prior book — It's Our World, Too! a history of young social activists — that I would take it on. I knew it would be a mountain of research. I knew it would be hard. I knew I'd kick myself and curse myself a thousand times for taking on something like this. But I did it. I wrote a huge proposal, found a publisher, and launched.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Describe the sources you used in writing We Were There, Too!

PHIL HOOSE: There were several kinds of sources that I used in making this book. What I preferred were primary sources, or direct sources. Those would be journals, diaries that people wrote while they were young, or interviews. Essentially, I found that while there were journals and there were diaries written by young people, there weren't that many of them, particularly back in the seventeenth century. And those who kept journals tended to be rich, well-educated kids, and more boys than girls, although there were some female diaries. Often I would find that the diaries or the journals were not very interesting. They did not write about things that I thought my readers would necessarily want. I want that seventh-grader sitting in that seat in that middle school, who is reading We Were There, Too! to keep turning pages.

I wanted not only seventy or so narratives of young people in history; I wanted them to be good narratives. So, some of the diaries and journals that I read were just not going to make it. There was a secondary source that I ended up using a lot, and that was retrospective accounts of adults; that is, people who later wrote about their childhood once they grew up. Frederick Douglass, for example, wrote some wonderful things about his childhood.

Sometimes, and somewhat reluctantly, I used a sort of tertiary source, which was accounts written by third parties or second parties – people who saw or knew somebody when they were young — somebody else. For example, we know about Sacagawea through the writings of Lewis and Clark. We know about Pocahontas through John Smith's writings. It would be wonderful if Pocahontas had written about her own experiences. But another reason that you don't find a lot of satisfying journals is that, if you're not working with literate culture groups or, as in the case of slaves, they were forbidden to write, at great penalty. You're just not going to get a lot of diaries and journals of eleven-year-old and fourteen-year-old African Americans in 1780 or something.

I think any person who sets out to tell history, especially to write history, worries about whether they're getting it right and worries about how to validate this. What I tried to do was, first of all, never to rely on a single source. I would read from several sources or interview from several sources, and thus get as much context as I could. Secondly, I sent the book out, sometimes chapter-by-chapter or section-by-section to a group of readers that included historians. I also had young readers — people who were eleven, twelve, thirteen, at the age of my intended audience. I was also helped a lot by a group from the Cambridge, Massachusetts Public Library.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did you go about selecting which historical events, characters and information to include in We Were There, Too!?

PHIL HOOSE: I thought very carefully about choosing the characters and the vignettes that I wrote about. I wanted to cover history from 1492 to 2000. I wanted about as many boys as girls and girls as boys. I wanted to make sure that major cultural groups that have made up this country were represented. I knew I couldn't get all of them, but I was hoping to find a good story for, really, each of them — (for example Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, African Americans, Jews who came over from Europe) — all that make up this country.

As time went on — as you get into the nineteenth century — I had more choices. Often I was choosing from among several people to write about. I tried not to choose famous people very often. There are a few exceptions. John Quincy Adams I thought just had such a great story. He was a fabulously gifted child, and he provided such a wonderful service to the country as a translator that I wanted to put his story in. There were a couple others, but most of these people were not famous. I chose what I thought was the best story.

As an example, I wanted a character who had been through the northern migration — an African American in the early part of the twentieth century who came up from the South to the North. Well, there were all sorts of stories involving such people. Most of them were not very detailed. I found a couple of first-person accounts. One was a musician. But I just didn't feel the vividness of the story. I didn't feel much suffering. I didn't feel much awe. Then I found a boy, Charles Denby, who had come up from the South and really told his story well. He told it later, as an adult. One of the great stories was crossing the Mason-Dixon line. Charles was on a train. That was the one thing he wanted the most, to see the Mason-Dixon line, which, of course, is an imaginary line. It's just a line on a map. But he thought it would be a real thing. He thought it would be like a fence or something like that. He was so disappointed when he heard that if you were on one side of a bridge — it turned out it was the bridge over the Ohio River at Louisville — you were on one side of the Mason-Dixon line, and when you were on the northern side, crossing into Indiana, you were on the other side of it. He just told his story so well.

TEACHINGBOOKS: The story of Christopher Columbus and his voyage is a well-known and controversial story. How did you decide which Columbus story to tell in We Were There, Too!?

PHIL HOOSE: I'm fascinated by what has come to be known as the Columbus story, the story that has been reduced to "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492." Here's this brilliant navigator who talked Ferdinand and Isabella into funding a voyage, takes some people over and sets in motion many of the things that we experience even now. I was fascinated to learn that about a quarter of the people who sailed with him on that first voyage from Spain, in September of 1492, were teenagers and younger boys. One reason that he wanted them, and that many ships' captains wanted them, is that they still had all their arms and legs. They were daredevil teenagers who were willing to climb up those masts and fix sails in a storm when the ship was rocking. Of course, a lot of people slipped and fell. All the "Peg-Leg Petes" and "Captain Hooks" were real. A lot of people lost their limbs in those times, and so boys were attractive. Columbus took four voyages to the New World. On the fourth of his voyages, nearly two-thirds of the sailors were teenagers or younger people.

I was also fascinated by the people who discovered Columbus, the Taino Indians, first in the Bahamas, and then Cuba and then what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. What was the experience of meeting these Europeans like for them? At first there were charming stories of these people seeing the Spaniards as god-like people who could maybe help them. But it quickly turned pretty sour.

In my research, I was escorted down a river in Cuba by an old man who showed me the cliffs in the far eastern part of Cuba from which families of Taino Indians leaped, in family suicides, rather than submit to Spanish rule and the horrible work regimen, and also to the smallpox, to the germs. They would rather die on their own terms.

Writing this has been fascinating to me. I went to Palos de la Frontera in Spain, which was the little town from which the tripulante that went with Columbus left, and where some of the boys got married the night before. I think about Columbus, and I think about the people who went with him, and I think especially about the Tainos. I've met a whole bunch of their descendants. I have many friends in Cuba who call themselves Indios, and who are very proud to be descended from those people.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You told the modern-day story of a boy who actually went to school HIV positive. Why did you decide to include this story?

PHIL HOOSE: I included in We Were There, Too! the story of Ryan White, who was a boy that was HIV-positive and later died of AIDS. He was a hemophiliac and got it through a blood transfusion. He got contaminated blood. He was shunned at his school. It was in Kokomo, Indiana. Ryan was a gutsy kid who was not afraid to express his feelings and got a lot of emotional support from his mother. He told in Congressional testimony what it was like to go to that school, how he was shunned, how his fellow students wouldn't sit next to him, didn't want to go to school with him, smeared hateful things on the restroom wall — he described just what it was like. It was a very important statement that Ryan White made. I thought he told it so eloquently, because it wasn't polished writing all the time. You could feel the emotion come out in the writing. I included this story because I wanted people to know the pain that was involved in the experience that Ryan had, but also because he showed such strength in going forward. I wanted people to see both the pain and the strength.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Why did you write Hoosiers, your book about high school basketball?

PHIL HOOSE: I wrote Hoosiers in the mid-eighties. Initially, I did a lot of research for a long article in Sports Illustrated about the sociology and folklore of high school basketball in Indiana. I grew up in Indiana in the fifties. Basketball, especially then in Indiana, was just all consuming in the winter. It was what everybody talked about. There were huge gymnasiums in just about all the high schools. For example, I went to a high school with 892 students in all four grades, and our gym seated 3,500 people. That is not at all atypical in Indiana, because that's what there was to do on a Friday night. Especially back then — life was simpler. There wasn't a girls' team and a boys' team; there was just a boys' team. So the whole community poured this enormous emotional investment into these ten boys, who were going to carry the hopes and dreams of the whole community into the tournament. It was sick, in a way, and wonderful in another way. I didn't realize how extraordinary this was until I left Indiana. When I left Indiana in 1970 or 1971, I moved to Manhattan [New York City] and Chelsea, the neighborhood right above Greenwich Village on the West Side. I began to acquire some perspective in life, and that included basketball. I thought the way it was in Indiana was the way it was everywhere. I thought every high school everywhere had a big gym. I went to a basketball game between George Washington High and somebody else in Manhattan, and nobody was watching. The game was played about 3 o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, not on a Friday night. Nobody was there. I thought, "How weird."

Then I began to think about it. I found some statistic on gym sizes and found out that seventeen of the eighteen biggest gyms in the United States were in Indiana. I started taking seriously some of the stories that I had grown up with — some of the folklore about Indiana basketball, and began to think, "what could basketball have meant to larger things in society in Indiana at that time? What could the Crispiatics High basketball team in Indianapolis have meant to the integration of schools in Indiana? Did the Warsaw High team of 1976 — the first girl's champion — did that result from Title IX? What could it have meant to girls throughout the state?" So I decided to write a book about the history and sociology of basketball in Indiana, through teams, through players, through the legends, through people. I got paid to go interview Larry Bird and Bobby Knight and Judy Warren and Oscar Robertson. What a gig! What a dream come true for somebody who grew up as I did.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What about Necessities?

PHIL HOOSE: Necessities was a book about racial problems in U.S. sports. I remember, Al Campanas, an older Dodger executive, went on Nightline one night — I think it was in 1986 — and began to rattle on about things that he believed African Americans couldn't do — basically, lead. Why weren't there more general managers? Why weren't there more quarterbacks? Why weren't there more catchers, pitchers, things like that? I saw his remarks right away as a book proposal. I made a proposal for a book, and Random House accepted it. I wrote this book.

There was a chapter about black catchers, African American swimmers, general managers, people in the media — why it was that you didn't see more African Americans in these leadership positions. But rather than asking other baseball executives, I asked African Americans who had tried to be those things. I found many quarterbacks, for example, who had been stars in high school and college, who then were invited to the National Football League tryout camp, where they were timed. And once they ran the 60-yard dash quickly, as some of them did, they were then invited to be wide receivers or defensive backs. They would tell the executives, "But wait, I'm a quarterback. I love to lead. I love to make decisions. I love to command the huddle." And they said, "What a shame it would be to waste your speed."

TEACHINGBOOKS: You appear to reflect on sports quite often. You keep asking questions of sociological significance. How important an influence is sports in your writing?

PHIL HOOSE: I like sports a lot. I was a competitive runner in high school. I've always played sports — I'm on a softball team now, and I'm fifty-four. I love to play, and I still try to be a good player. But my main interest in sports as a writer is the influence of popular culture on people's lives. I thought it would have been a mistake to write a long book about young people in U.S. history, for example, without writing about young baseball players or a young female basketball player. If you're going to talk about Title IX, you have to write a story about a young girl athlete and how that changed a life.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Hey, Little Ant is a fabulous and unusual picture book of yours. What is the genesis of this story?

PHIL HOOSE: Hey, Little Ant started as a song that Hannah, my daughter, and I would sing. We had a family band that involved Shoshana, my wife, Ruby, my younger daughter, and Hannah who was nine at the time Hey, Little Ant was written.

It came about when one day we saw Ruby squishing ants out in the driveway She was all over these ants. I went up to Ruby and said, "How would you like to be one of those ants?" She said, "I wouldn't care." But then I came inside and looked out the window at her, and she had stopped. That's when it occurred to me that the first time most people think about the ethics of killing and the option not to has to do with squishing bugs. When you squish a bug, you kind of think about it. I thought, "Why don't I script a negotiating session between an ant about to get squished and Ruby, the kid about to squish it?"

Hannah and I had been writing songs together. We wrote the thing in about an hour. At the end we said, "How are we going to end this thing?" Then we both just said, "We're not going to end it. This is way too big a question for us to give an answer to." So we didn't. It ends with the question, "Should the ant get squished? Should the ant go free? It's up to the kid, not up to me. We'll leave the kid with the raised-up shoe. What do you think that kid should do?" How can you answer a question like that?

After we wrote that song, we sang it at a lot of concerts around Portland and Maine and New England. The way we sang it was, Hannah would stand up and have her foot raised over me, and I would be the kid, down on the floor, hovering — "please don't squish me."

All the other songs that we sang, there would just be applause. Hey, Little Ant was different. From the very first, when we would be singing that song, Hannah and I would take our bow and we'd look out in the audience, and along with the applause, there would be kids out there waving their hands, way up in the air. They wanted to talk. So I would say, "Yes?" And a child would stand up and say, "Well, what if it's a mosquito and it's trying to bite you?" Or, "What if it's a bee and it's trying to sting you?" Or, "What if it's a hundred ants and they're after a glob of honey on your kitchen table? What do you do then? Can you squish it?" And we would say, "Well, what a very good question. What do you think?" And we'd get responses from parents, who would say, "Listen, we're infested here. Would you back off? Could you lighten up on this a little bit?"

TEACHINGBOOKS: This story took a while to sell to a publisher. What happened?

PHIL HOOSE: Phyllis Wender was my agent, and she was enthusiastic about Hey, Little Ant, yet it took five-and-a-half years to sell it. We kept getting all these letters back from editors saying, "Children need things resolved. They can't accept a book that ends with a question." I'd write them back and say, "What about The Cat in the Hat? What about The Butter Battle Book?" I had other examples. They'd say, "Well, that's Dr. Seuss. He can get away with anything. He's the exception."

I knew that if I could find an illustrator who could shift perspectives from big to little and little to big, we could make a hit book of Hey, Little Ant. And we did. Nicole Geiger, my editor at Tricycle Press, found Debbie Tilley, who is just a wonderful, wonderful illustrator.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Can you share a little of your writing process?

PHIL HOOSE: I work for The Nature Conservancy, as well as write books. It's a juggling act, because I travel for The Nature Conservancy a fair amount. The book We Were There, Too! was a real exhaustive, time-absorbing process. It was a lot of work. I had to organize my time and my life very carefully at that point.

My typical workday — let's say I'm at home, I'm not on the road, and I'm able to write – I get up at maybe six, because my wife gets up that early. We have breakfast. I tend to fix breakfast around here. My daughters, Hannah and Ruby, get up. We eat breakfast at seven. I've read the paper by then. They're out the door. Then I just walk upstairs and begin. I check my e-mail messages. I write out a list of the things that I'm going to do during the day. I tend to write in the morning rather than the afternoon. I've just found it's the freshest time to do that. It just depends on where I am in a book. If I have people to call and interview, I do that. If it's a writing day, where I needed to work on a chapter or two, I do that. If I have to find photos, work on photo research, I do that.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck in your work?

PHIL HOOSE: When I get stuck with my work, I do one of two things. I have a steel drum, a tenor pan, in my office, and I get up and play it. That helps me a lot. That helps me refocus. The other thing I do is I build in certain breaks for myself during the day. I have a break at 10:53 in the morning on a writing day, in which I go down, fix myself a bowl of soup. That takes exactly seven minutes. At 11 o'clock, I am in front of Sports Center. I watch the first fourteen minutes of Sports Center. In the summer that gives me the baseball clips; in the winter, it gives me basketball clips.

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